Against the back drop of Independence Day celebrations, Charles Dickens Elementary School Principal Chick L. Gruber jubilantly declared unconditional victory in the war against the post-Columbine edu-terror infecting public school classrooms with last week's expulsion of eight-year-old Mitzie Madigan.

Mitzie's crime was to bring a fortune cookie to class for show-and-tell. Officials declared that the Chinese ideograms on the back of the fortune identified the strip of paper as explosive packing materials for M-80s, illegal in the U.S. since Congress passed the "Child Protection Act" in 1966, and thus the young terrorist was quickly ushered out of her third grade summer school reading class in handcuffs and taken into the custody of the Department of Homeland Security.

While we agree that good order and discipline in the classroom is a bedrock value for an effective educational system, the unabated perp walk out of Charles Dickens Elementary School with Gruber's strict enforcement of the Calabash County Unified School District's Zero Tolerance Policy has finally reduced the attendance roll there to . . . well . . . zero.

We're no math wizards, but this simply doesn't add up to a win for anyone -- kids, parents, teachers or community -- except, perhaps, for a megalomaniacal dictator.